One Tree, Many Leaves: The Master's Farewell in London

*A retelling based on **'Abdu'l-Bahá in London**, which preserves the talks the Master gave during His 1911 visit to England, including His farewell address at the Passmore Edwards Settlement. Phrases in quotation marks are words recorded as 'Abdu'l-Bahá's in that book; a few descriptions are the recorder's own summary, noted as such.*

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In the autumn of 1911, 'Abdu'l-Bahá came to the West for the first time. He was no longer young, and the whole of His long life had been spent in exile and imprisonment in the East; only recently had He been freed.

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Now, an elderly Man in a turban and an 'abá, He had crossed the sea to England to bring, in person, the message He had carried in His heart through forty years of captivity — that humankind is one. London received Him with wonder. Clergy invited Him to their pulpits, the famous came to call, the newspapers took notice.

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And as His visit drew to its close, He gave a farewell gathering — not in a cathedral or a great hall of the powerful, but in a settlement house.

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The choice of place was itself a kind of sermon. The Passmore Edwards Settlement, in Tavistock Place, was one of the first of its kind in England: a house planted in the city by socially-minded men and women to serve the working poor and their children. Within its walls, working women were supported and some of the very first proper classrooms in the country for children with disabilities had been opened.

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It was a house built on the conviction that the overlooked and the struggling matter — that the broken child and the labouring woman are not to be left outside the circle of human concern. To such a house, on the twenty-ninth of September, the Master came to say His farewell to England.

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The hall filled — some four hundred and sixty people, by the record, of every sort and station: scholars and reformers and people of faith, a Jewish thinker, a man of letters, men and women drawn from across the divisions of class and creed that ordinarily kept them apart. The atmosphere, those present remembered, was unusually charged with a quiet spiritual feeling. And into that gathering of the most varied kind, 'Abdu'l-Bahá spoke of the thing He had come the whole way to say: the oneness of the human family.

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He reached for an image that anyone in the room could carry home. He likened the world of humanity, the account records, to a single tree, and all the nations to its branches, and the peoples to its leaves and buds and fruits. Consider what that picture does. A tree is not an alliance of separate plants that have agreed to stand near one another; it is one living thing.

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The branches differ — some high, some low, some heavy with fruit, some bare — and the leaves are past counting and no two alike. Yet there are not many lives in a tree but one life, one sap rising through the whole of it, one root feeding every farthest leaf. So it is, the Master was teaching, with the races and nations and peoples of the earth.

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Their endless variety is real and good — the tree is the more beautiful for all its branches and leaves — but the life that runs through them is one life. To set branch against branch, or to imagine that one leaf is of a different tree than another, is simply to misread what humanity is.

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From that image He drew the plain conclusion. **"The whole earth is one home,"** He told them, **"and all peoples, did they but know it, are bathed in the oneness of God's mercy."** It is a sentence worth weighing slowly. He did not say the earth ought one day to become one home, after enough treaties and progress. He said it already *is* one home; the oneness is the fact, and our divisions are the illusion laid over it.

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And the reason He gave was not political but spiritual: all peoples are bathed in the one mercy of the one God — *did they but know it.* The whole tragedy of human strife, in that small phrase, is a tragedy of not knowing; we tear at one another in a single house, under a single mercy, for want of recognising where we are.

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And He grounded it, as He always did, in God Himself. **"God created all,"** He said. **"He gives sustenance to all. He guides and trains all under the shadow of His bounty."** There are no foreign children at that table. The same Maker made every face in the hall and every face beyond it; the same hand feeds them all; the same care watches over them all.

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If that is true — and it was the very heart of what He had come to declare — then the lines the world draws between its peoples are lines drawn across the face of one family by children who have forgotten they are kin.

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He did not leave them in mere idea, but lifted their eyes to what such knowing would bring. When the light of love and unity should shine, He told them, this world would become a new world; things material would become a mirror of the divine; human hearts would meet and embrace one another.

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**"As the East and the West are illumined by one sun,"** He said, **"so all races, nations, and creeds shall be seen as the servants of the One God."** One sun lights the East and the West without preference, asking nothing of either but that it turn toward the light; and under that one sun, He promised, the day would come when every race and nation and faith would be seen for what they truly are — fellow-servants of the one God, leaves of the one tree.

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Then the Master took His leave of England. He had crossed the world an old and much-tried Man, and at the very end of His first visit to the West He had gone, of all places, to a house for the poor and the disabled to lay down His parting word — that the whole earth is one home and all its peoples one family. He had not shouted it from a height.

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He had said it gently, in a settlement hall, among the very sort of people the world is quickest to push to the edge, and had told them they stood at the centre of God's one mercy with everyone else.

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This is the beauty the Feast of Jamál is named for: not the beauty of any single branch or leaf, but the beauty of the whole tree seen at last as one living thing. 'Abdu'l-Bahá did not merely argue for the oneness of humankind; He held it up before a room of strangers as a fact already true, waiting only to be known — one tree, countless leaves, a single life rising through them all.

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*This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see **'Abdu'l-Bahá in London**.*

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